Thursday, September 1

Thursday "It's Olio Week!" Olio

• Maybe you've heard, but my personal Congressman, Andre Carson, did a bad thing by talking like Glenn Beck within Glenn Beck's hearing. Though in fairness, he made up for it by doing a great thing: refusing to apologize.

If you did hear about this I hope it wasn't from the Indianapolis media, which hates to be reminded that the city of Indianapolis is represented in Congress by a scary African-American Muslim fellow who is wildly popular among the sort of people local media can't find much use for except as extras at a shooting scene.

Carson's comments made Indianapolis Star [caution: Indianapolis Star Evapo-Link™] political columnist Matt Tully sad. Because Matt Tully likes Andre Carson, and wishes he'd behave better than the Teabaggers. Because Matt Tully doesn't really like the Teabaggers ("Although I appreciate [their] efforts to increase attention paid to the federal deficit"). So much so that he says he's pretty sure he's written it down somewhere.

Plus, all the people who scream about racist Teabagger comments are now rushing to defend Carson, and all the people who defend racist Teabagger comments are now complaining about him. And it's really, really painful for journalists to have to keep reminding us how above this sort of behavior they themselves are.

I just want to mention here, in my role as shit-tossing apologist, that Carson's predecessor, his grandmother Julia, was so utterly reviled, and subject to such repulsive racial crap in Central Indiana that it was practically impossible for a white person to walk into a public establishment in any Republican enclave (read: the suburban doughnut counties) when she was in the news without getting drenched in racism like gutter water by a passing car. That absolutely includes the other side of closed Republican party doors (former Sheriff Jack Cottey, running against an African-American in 2002 and losing badly, created a Xerox pastiche handbill of his opponent, Ms Carson, and Bill Clinton [!] that made Carson look like the Wild Woman of Borneo). And, undoubtedly, it was heard repeatedly, for years, by every political reporter in this town.

• Here's a proposal: no more budget cutting talk until we get our $60 billion back from the people who stole it, and the people who signed the blank check they cashed in the first place.

Just kiddin'.

• How in the name of Ron Ziegler does the White House 1) try to schedule a Congressional address the night of a Republican debate show; 2) claim it was an oversight; and 3) wind up losing to John Boehner and The Seven Specks of Granite all at once?

I'll just ask again: what did Barack Obama want to be President for? So he could bring to the Executive branch the same studied Wisdom of Consensus Building he'd seen in action in the US Senate? I swear to God this is a guy who thought he was running for Vice President, until he, John Edwards, and the not great but late Tim "Spud" Russert played Let's Hump Hillary for Halloween, 2007. This should have been enough right there to tell C-Student America, let alone the Exceptional one that God favors with the right leader at the right time, that there was no fit candidate in the Democratic primaries.

I'm sorry. Things could be worse, I suppose, but that thought is not anodyne to the throbbing hemorrhoid sufferer. When Barack Obama stood on various stages throughout the United States and called, nightly, for the crowd to give way so the latest Lady Faintee could be ministered to, th' fuck was he thinking about? Was he hoping to bundle all that adoration and positive energy into a legislative package that could be pled down to time served?

And, so help me, if his deal with Boehner doesn't include an obligation on Orange Man's part to say something gratuitously racist just before the general elections then there's no sense to this at all.

6 comments:

How in the name of Ron Ziegler does the White House 1) try to schedule a Congressional address the night of a Republican debate show; 2) claim it was an oversight; and 3) wind up losing to John Boehner and The Seven Specks of Granite all at once?

I don't want to be mister conspiracy, but it gets harder and harder to dismiss, "Because they're paid to lose."~

What I remember is that the Star polls usually had Julia Carson set to lose in a tight race... and she always won pretty handily when the election came. That's when I learned to ignore polls about inner-Indianapolis candidates, because either the Star would underpoll Dem voters, or Dem voters, being working people and not retired Lilly execs, wouldn't be answering their phones all day.

And anyone who hasn't noticed the rather wide strain of racism in the Teabag movement is deliberately ignoring it. I haven't in my life since maybe the 60s heard as much racist talk ("Bring back the term 'colored!'") as in the last two years, and most of it comes from people who are in or sympathetic to the TP.